(1853)
The process of dramatic individualization is perhaps best illustrated by comparison to water. Everywhere water is water and man is man, but as the former acquires a mysterious flavor from every stratum of earth that it flows or trickles through, so man acquires a peculiarity from his time, his nation, history, and fate.
(1857) Man would perhaps still have as acute senses as animals, if thinking did not divert him from the outer world.
(1859)
Ideas are the same thing in the drama that counterpoint is in music; nothing in themselves but the primary condition for everything.
(1861)
(Concerning my Nibelungen.)
It seems to me that a purely human tragedy, natural in all its motifs, can be constructed upon the mythical foundation inseparable from this subject, and that so far as my powers permit I have constructed one. The mysticism of the background should at most remind us that what we hear in this poem is not the seconds' clock, which measures off the existence of gnats and ants, but the clock that marks the hours only. Let the reader who is nevertheless disturbed by the mythical foundation consider that, if he examines closely, he will also discover such a basis in man himself, and that, too, in the mere man, in the representative of the species, and not only in the more specific branch of the same, in the individual. Or may man's fundamental qualities, either physical or mental, be accounted for, that is to say, can they be deduced from any other organic canon than the one which has been posited once for all with man himself, and which cannot be traced farther back to a final primitive cause of things, or be critically resolved into its components? Are they not in part, as for example most of the passions, opposed to reason and conscience, therefore to the very faculties of man which, being quite general and disinterested, may most safely be designated as those which connect him immediately with the universe, and has this contradiction ever been explained away? Why, then, in art negate an act upon which is founded even our view of nature?
Otto Prechtler related to me the following incident. When Grillparzer made my acquaintance upon my arrival in Vienna he said to Prechtler: "No one on earth will be able to influence this man. One person might have done so, but he is dead; I mean Goethe." A few years later he added, "I was mistaken, not even Goethe would have been able to influence him."
(1863)